Voice messaging systems are common in today's business community. Most business organizations or enterprises make use of a private branch exchange (PBX) to direct a caller's telephone call to the appropriate extension of the called party. If the called party is unable to answer the telephone call, the telephone call is forwarded to a voice messaging system which allows the caller to leave a voice message in the mailbox assigned to the called party. Messages left for called parties within the business organization can be retrieved from memory by calling the voice messaging system using a telephone and entering appropriate commands via a touch-tone keypad. Retrieved messages can be played, forwarded or deleted. An example of a voice messaging system of this nature is the VoiceMemo II® sold by Centigram Communications Corporation of San Jose, Calif.
In addition to voice messages, communications within business organizations are also often stored in facsimile and text formats. In the past, separate messaging systems have been used to handle these different types of communications. Unfortunately, prior art messaging systems designed to handle one type of communication have not provided any means to interact with messaging systems handling other types of communications. This has required users to access each messaging system individually to retrieve messages and has required business organizations to maintain and manage multiple messaging systems separately. As a result, it has been necessary to establish separate accounts, address lists and message mailboxes in each messaging system for the various users in the business organizations.
More recently, attempts have been made to interconnect different messaging systems to provide access to different types of messages from a single point. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,349,636 to Irribarren discloses a system and method for voice mail systems and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. The Irribarren system includes a voice message system and a text message system integrated via a network which coordinates the functions of each individual message system. A user may access messages stored in the voice message system and in the text message system via a single telephone call. Although this system allows access to different types of messages, the voice message and text message systems require separate management.
The current trend is to integrate these various messaging systems to allow users to access all types of communications once a connection is made to the messaging system. To that end, unified messaging systems have been developed to provide users access to virtually all of their communications. Messaging systems of this nature store all messages for entities within the enterprise at a common location. The entity may be an individual, group, department, or any appropriate logical organization. Users accessing the messaging system via a telephone, desktop computer or other communication device, have access to all of their messages regardless of message type and regardless of the type of communication device used to access the messaging system. Appropriate message translators such as text-to-speech (TTS) converters, speech-to-text (SST) converters etc. are included to enable users to retrieve messages stored in formats not supported by the communication devices used to access the messaging system.
When a user accesses a messaging system of this nature through a personal computer, the messages in the user's mailbox are presented to the user via a graphical user interface established by the messaging software executed by the personal computer. As an example, well known messaging software of this nature, is sold by Microsoft Corporation under the name Microsoft Outlook®. The graphical user interface presents forms (windows) to users to allow users to compose and read messages. In unified messaging systems, the messages may be of voice, facsimile, text and graphic types.
Depending on the type of message composed by a user, a message may be placed as an attachment to the message. FIGS. 1A and 1B show an example of an electronic mail (email) message composed using a compose form 10 produced by Microsoft Outlook® from Microsoft Corporation. The composed message includes message properties 12 (e.g., to, from and subject) and a message body 14 including the text of the message. The message body 14 also includes three attachments, including a text file (status.txt), a Microsoft Word® document file (txtDocument.doc), and a bitmap file (connectd.BMP). In the case of a unified message system, a voice message would also appear as an attachment to the email message.
When the message is delivered to a recipient, the received message is presented to the recipient in a similar form. FIGS. 2A and 2B show an example of the email message in a read form 20 provided by the recipient's messaging software, namely Microsoft Outlook® from Microsoft Corporation.
If the recipient receiving the message replies to the received message or forwards the received message to yet another user, the original message is placed in the reply or forwarded message as an attachment. Such an attachment is commonly referred to as an embedded message. The attached reply or forwarded message is typically represented by an icon in the body of the message. The icon representing the attachment preserves the message header or envelope information. A recipient of the reply or forwarded message must double-click on each icon within the body of the message separately to read the forwarded message and the original message. As will be appreciated, for multi-generation messages, a recipient may be required to open a number of messages, many levels deep to follow the communication history of a message. Not only that, each time an icon is double-clicked, Microsoft Outlook opens a new window to display the underlying message. This of course makes it difficult to read multi-generation messages.
Thus, there is a need to provide an improved messaging system and graphical user interface for displaying messages.